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Abstract

Ecosystem Services (ES) and Urban Services (US) influence place liveability in a comparable manner. Consequently, assessing landscape liveability considering both types of services can result effective for landscape planning and policy-making purposes. Since liveability depends also on local population preferences and perceptions, stakeholder involvement results essential for a more coherent liveability assessment. In this study a Spatial Multicriteria Decision Aiding (S-MCDA) approach guided the development of a LIveability Spatial Assessment Model (LISAM). Using a combination of GIS techniques (Euclidean distance, kernel density estimation, network analysis, viewshed analysis), consistent and comparable ES and US spatial indices were calculated in a study area located in central Italy. The indices were implemented in open-source geo-spatial software (QGIS, PostGIS and PostgreSQL). According to the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), they were integrated with their percentage weights on liveability deriving from stakeholders interviews. Then, to investigate the liveability levels of local population, main statistics of liveability values were calculated per census section. Results include overall liveability indices at a local scale, and key statistics of liveability related to resident population. The work highlights the effectiveness of LISAM to assess local liveability and to deliver important information for policy-makers. LISAM approach opens the opportunity to integrate also ecosystem and urban disservices together with ES and US in liveability assessment to consider also the factors generated by landscape components that reduce the overall level of place liveability.

Author Comment

We improved the manuscript considering the comments sent by the reviewer.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Sara Antognelli conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Marco Vizzari conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The research in this article did not generate, collect or analyse any raw data or code.

Funding

This research was conducted within the framework of the TRUSTEE (Towards RUral Synergies and Trade-offs between Economic development and Ecosystem services) project funded by the RURAGRI ERA-NET Consortium, which includes the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food, and Forestry Policies. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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